From Walking Targets
Data-Mining Begins at School
As many of my readers know, in the 1980s I stumbled on what appeared to be a testing scam in the State of Pennsylvania. I had long since escaped the teaching profession and was working in an unrelated field. But a chance discovery in 1984 led to a 14-year-long investigation of the Mental Health Movement which, I confirmed much later, gave us today’s psychologized K-12 education, complete with computer cross-matching capability of personal and family information. This put us firmly on the road to socialism, environmental extremism and, of course, psychopolitics, which, as indicated in the Foreword, includes data-mining. Historically, this comprises the formative stages of a police state—children reporting on their parents to representatives of government.
My curiosity was first piqued by the Educational Quality Assessment, or EQA. The EQA (which later appeared under a different name, pretty much intact) was given every two years. The questions turned out to be fairly representative of assessments given in other states as well, such as:
Looking at the Midnight Artist Question from the vantage point of 2007, one recognizes the seeds of Columbine. Instead of asking what it would take to make a kid commit vandalism, subsequent questionnaires, under the cover of mental health, have been asking pupils what it would take to make them shoot their classmates and teachers.
Test creators have always maintained, of course, that they are not trying to plant suggestions in youngsters’ heads. Kevin P. Dwyer, president of the National Association of School Psychologists, who helped develop the mass-screening project in Texas,explains that this is “valuable information, almost impossible to obtain from any other source….”
But triggering conflict and strife is exactly what these hypothetical questions and self-reports wrought. Most adults could see through such a ploy right away—which is why they were never permitted to see these “tests.”
But such questionnaires, which today are ubiquitous, do something else, too. They are analyzed by behavioral scientists (educational psychologists), and the conclusions made about children and their families are often wrong—dead wrong. Once a child selects an answer that sends up an alarm bell, anything can happen, from mandatory counseling, to placement in Special Education classes, to drugging and even removal from the home.
The EQA had 375 questions covering attitudes, world views and opinions. There were just enough academic questions to appear credible.
The next shocker was the scoring mechanism. It revealed points given for what was called a "minimum positive attitude." For example, on the "Midnight Artists" question, the preferred response was "b— Most of the popular students in school were in the club." Why "b"?
The Interpretive Literature, which was, and still is, off limits to laypersons, explained why. The EQA’s creators were testing for: the child’s "focus of control"; his "willingness to receive stimuli"; his "amenability to change"; and his inclination to "conform to group goals." In plain English this means: Where’s the kid coming from? Is he easily influenced? Are his views firm or easy-to-change? Will he "go along to get along"?
Answer "b" to the Midnight Artists question was preferred because it reflected a “willingness to conform to group goals”— one of the behavioral litmus tests. This is what is meant about triggering an alarm bell. Suddenly, child experts are going to scrutinize a kid with “non-preferred” answers a little more closely, even though his parents might be teaching their child to think for himself instead of necessarily conforming to the fickle demands of the peer group.
In 2005, poor Pennsylvania was again selected as a pilot state for mental health screening—this time of the universal, mandatory variety. But a whistleblower named Allen Jones turned up the heat in Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General. He told the British Medical Journal and the New York Times about the perks enjoyed by some Pennsylvania staffers as well as certain ties to pharmaceutical companies. He was sacked for his trouble.
Just how the onerous piece of federal screening legislation called “New Freedom Initiative” made it through the U.S. House of Representatives despite the questionable goings-on is the subject of the article entitled “What? Are You Crazy?” First published by Chronicles: A Magazine of the American Culture in 2005, this article has been disseminated internationally.
My nine years as a classroom teacher, interspersed among other career opportunities, confirmed my initial impression from college: that my role was not to transmit "basics," or literacy, or proficiency at anything, but rather to advance the cause of so-called "mental health." Accountability meant satisfying government mandates that never improved education. Nor was my role about answering to parents, or even satisfying local superintendents. No one seemed to care if we knew anything about the subject we were majoring in—the one we were going to teach. Indeed, we were told essentially not to teach--not to put red marks on pupils’ papers, not to transmit grammar that might conflict with any substandard usage used at home, because it might somehow hurt a pupil’s self-esteem. Instead we were taught to “relate” and be “hip.” No one cared about math or the value of “x.” In essence, we were called upon to be social workers, the first foot-soldiers in a clandestine movement to transform American values and ideals through a steady series of modifications in the educational structure and in curriculum. The only way, of course, to gauge success was through an ostensible system of testing—primarily of student attitudes, perceptions (including level of gullibility) and opinions.
While I “got” the part about serving as a social worker in the classroom, I didn’t really see the whole picture while I was actually teaching. I understood, for example, that fewer and fewer teachers were pursuing an academic major; that most of us were majoring in Education, which meant, quite simply: Psychology—i.e., social work. What I didn’t get was the rationale behind the Mental Health Movement in the classroom.
“Behavioral science” and “mental health” in the context they are addressed in these pages, has more to do with information-gathering and opinion-molding than with neuropsychology. Neurology, a branch of medicine concerned with the nervous system and its disorders, utilizes psychology in an attempt to assess and repair damage caused by physical diseases, brain trauma or injuries and medically verifiable disorders related to cognitive function (i.e., full utilization of one’s perceptual and knowledge-retention faculties).
The concept behind neuropsychology has some admittedly interesting possibilities, especially for victims of strokes, Alzheimer’s disease and Down’s syndrome. Certainly strides have been made in neurology. But the marriage of that field with psychology has become so hopelessly tangled with little-understood emotional, personality and behavioral factors that it has led to the invention of non-verifiable diseases and even phony disorders, better described as quirks or individual differences.
All people have good days and bad days, and life’s experiences inevitably contribute to how a particular individual, child or adult, is going to perceive information or react to events on any given day. For example, many Holocaust survivors who both witnessed and/or underwent torture not only enjoyed professional success once the war ended, but came through their ordeals mentally and spiritually intact. Today’s youngsters, on the other hand, are supposedly traumatized by a parent who is “controlling” or a teacher who is harsh. There is no medical explanation for these disparate reactions, but psychology appears determined to find one (Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, various conduct disorders, and other ailments for which no objective test exists).
Why do some people hold onto their “sanity” while others fold? So far, there is no medical answer—and certainly no drug or therapy that has any track record to speak of. Consequently, the best psychiatrists are those who fully recognize (and some do) that objective science dictates first ruling out medical conditions and anomalies that might pertain to a patient’s discomfort. In the absence of such, the psychiatrist’s ability to help the patient is limited at best. Various drugs, of course, can blunt the emotions, which may be helpful in the short term for those who are on emotional overload, so to speak, but in the end, the application of reason and the tenets of faith—summed up in what everyone used to call “character”—is still all that exists.
The term “behavioral science,” as I refer to it in these pages is Psychology with a capital P, the one that has been hijacked by a mostly leftist faction and turned into a virtual state religion. This is something based in politics, not in medicine, and it has reared its vicious head down through the years in the form of Hitler’s Third Reich and communism’s political prisons-cum-psychiatric “hospitals.” Unfortunately, the 1940s produced experiments in psychological manipulation—some of which can be classified as torture—that for half a century allowed Psychology to change the political landscape, morphing into a tool of coercion under the deceptive phrase “mental health.” This is the Psychology that has infiltrated the schools, the courts, the theological seminaries and to some extent has spread even to medicine itself.
That is why even those few educators who do specialize in an academic subject in college often wind up “facilitating” some other subject once they hit the classroom.
Facilitating and coaching: That’s what teaching is called now. This entails a whole new curricular experience: "survival and coping skills," "anger management," "conflict resolution," "self-esteem," "diversity," and more. Little in the curriculum provides insight into our cultural, constitutional or theological underpinnings. Courses like logic, philosophy, and civics, which once helped kids get a handle on modern issues, are practically gone. Nothing supports ideals like self-reliance, property rights, limited government (especially in the context of regulatory power), or religious morality in society. Physics, chemistry, calculus, and physiology are reserved for the few with very high IQ scores, kids who are then summarily skimmed off the top for what can best be described as ideological studies in political correctness, or else rounded up to "mentor" slower students.
Quite by accident I discovered the specifics of the campaign to re-orient education’s purpose. A left-wing cadre of so-called “behaviorist” educators—psychologists like the late Ralph Tyler, Richard Wolf, and Walcott Beatty—began urging their colleagues to abandon traditional concepts about right and wrong. Suddenly something called “high religiosity” was deemed a risk factor (a.k.a. marker) for mental illness. Religion itself became equated with dogmatism, inflexibility, resistance to change, paranoia, and irrationality—echoing the pronouncements of infamous atheists from the late 1800s to the early 1930s—Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Franz J. Kallman and John Dewey.
As many of my readers know, in the 1980s I stumbled on what appeared to be a testing scam in the State of Pennsylvania. I had long since escaped the teaching profession and was working in an unrelated field. But a chance discovery in 1984 led to a 14-year-long investigation of the Mental Health Movement which, I confirmed much later, gave us today’s psychologized K-12 education, complete with computer cross-matching capability of personal and family information. This put us firmly on the road to socialism, environmental extremism and, of course, psychopolitics, which, as indicated in the Foreword, includes data-mining. Historically, this comprises the formative stages of a police state—children reporting on their parents to representatives of government.
My curiosity was first piqued by the Educational Quality Assessment, or EQA. The EQA (which later appeared under a different name, pretty much intact) was given every two years. The questions turned out to be fairly representative of assessments given in other states as well, such as:
- I often wish I were someone else. [or] I get upset easily at home. The student checks: [a] Very true of me, [b] Mostly true of me, [c] Mostly untrue of me, [d] Very untrue of me.
- You are asked to dinner at the home of a classmate having a religion much different from yours. In this situation I would feel: [a] Very comfortable, [b] Comfortable, [c] Slightly uncomfortable, [d] Very uncomfortable.
- There is a secret club at school called the Midnight Artists. They go out late at night and paint funny sayings and pictures on buildings. I would JOIN THE CLUB when I knew … [a] my best friend had asked me to join; [b] Most of the popular students in school were in the club; [c] my parents would ground me if they found out I joined.
Looking at the Midnight Artist Question from the vantage point of 2007, one recognizes the seeds of Columbine. Instead of asking what it would take to make a kid commit vandalism, subsequent questionnaires, under the cover of mental health, have been asking pupils what it would take to make them shoot their classmates and teachers.
Test creators have always maintained, of course, that they are not trying to plant suggestions in youngsters’ heads. Kevin P. Dwyer, president of the National Association of School Psychologists, who helped develop the mass-screening project in Texas,explains that this is “valuable information, almost impossible to obtain from any other source….”
But triggering conflict and strife is exactly what these hypothetical questions and self-reports wrought. Most adults could see through such a ploy right away—which is why they were never permitted to see these “tests.”
But such questionnaires, which today are ubiquitous, do something else, too. They are analyzed by behavioral scientists (educational psychologists), and the conclusions made about children and their families are often wrong—dead wrong. Once a child selects an answer that sends up an alarm bell, anything can happen, from mandatory counseling, to placement in Special Education classes, to drugging and even removal from the home.
The EQA had 375 questions covering attitudes, world views and opinions. There were just enough academic questions to appear credible.
The next shocker was the scoring mechanism. It revealed points given for what was called a "minimum positive attitude." For example, on the "Midnight Artists" question, the preferred response was "b— Most of the popular students in school were in the club." Why "b"?
The Interpretive Literature, which was, and still is, off limits to laypersons, explained why. The EQA’s creators were testing for: the child’s "focus of control"; his "willingness to receive stimuli"; his "amenability to change"; and his inclination to "conform to group goals." In plain English this means: Where’s the kid coming from? Is he easily influenced? Are his views firm or easy-to-change? Will he "go along to get along"?
Answer "b" to the Midnight Artists question was preferred because it reflected a “willingness to conform to group goals”— one of the behavioral litmus tests. This is what is meant about triggering an alarm bell. Suddenly, child experts are going to scrutinize a kid with “non-preferred” answers a little more closely, even though his parents might be teaching their child to think for himself instead of necessarily conforming to the fickle demands of the peer group.
In 2005, poor Pennsylvania was again selected as a pilot state for mental health screening—this time of the universal, mandatory variety. But a whistleblower named Allen Jones turned up the heat in Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General. He told the British Medical Journal and the New York Times about the perks enjoyed by some Pennsylvania staffers as well as certain ties to pharmaceutical companies. He was sacked for his trouble.
Just how the onerous piece of federal screening legislation called “New Freedom Initiative” made it through the U.S. House of Representatives despite the questionable goings-on is the subject of the article entitled “What? Are You Crazy?” First published by Chronicles: A Magazine of the American Culture in 2005, this article has been disseminated internationally.
My nine years as a classroom teacher, interspersed among other career opportunities, confirmed my initial impression from college: that my role was not to transmit "basics," or literacy, or proficiency at anything, but rather to advance the cause of so-called "mental health." Accountability meant satisfying government mandates that never improved education. Nor was my role about answering to parents, or even satisfying local superintendents. No one seemed to care if we knew anything about the subject we were majoring in—the one we were going to teach. Indeed, we were told essentially not to teach--not to put red marks on pupils’ papers, not to transmit grammar that might conflict with any substandard usage used at home, because it might somehow hurt a pupil’s self-esteem. Instead we were taught to “relate” and be “hip.” No one cared about math or the value of “x.” In essence, we were called upon to be social workers, the first foot-soldiers in a clandestine movement to transform American values and ideals through a steady series of modifications in the educational structure and in curriculum. The only way, of course, to gauge success was through an ostensible system of testing—primarily of student attitudes, perceptions (including level of gullibility) and opinions.
While I “got” the part about serving as a social worker in the classroom, I didn’t really see the whole picture while I was actually teaching. I understood, for example, that fewer and fewer teachers were pursuing an academic major; that most of us were majoring in Education, which meant, quite simply: Psychology—i.e., social work. What I didn’t get was the rationale behind the Mental Health Movement in the classroom.
“Behavioral science” and “mental health” in the context they are addressed in these pages, has more to do with information-gathering and opinion-molding than with neuropsychology. Neurology, a branch of medicine concerned with the nervous system and its disorders, utilizes psychology in an attempt to assess and repair damage caused by physical diseases, brain trauma or injuries and medically verifiable disorders related to cognitive function (i.e., full utilization of one’s perceptual and knowledge-retention faculties).
The concept behind neuropsychology has some admittedly interesting possibilities, especially for victims of strokes, Alzheimer’s disease and Down’s syndrome. Certainly strides have been made in neurology. But the marriage of that field with psychology has become so hopelessly tangled with little-understood emotional, personality and behavioral factors that it has led to the invention of non-verifiable diseases and even phony disorders, better described as quirks or individual differences.
All people have good days and bad days, and life’s experiences inevitably contribute to how a particular individual, child or adult, is going to perceive information or react to events on any given day. For example, many Holocaust survivors who both witnessed and/or underwent torture not only enjoyed professional success once the war ended, but came through their ordeals mentally and spiritually intact. Today’s youngsters, on the other hand, are supposedly traumatized by a parent who is “controlling” or a teacher who is harsh. There is no medical explanation for these disparate reactions, but psychology appears determined to find one (Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, various conduct disorders, and other ailments for which no objective test exists).
Why do some people hold onto their “sanity” while others fold? So far, there is no medical answer—and certainly no drug or therapy that has any track record to speak of. Consequently, the best psychiatrists are those who fully recognize (and some do) that objective science dictates first ruling out medical conditions and anomalies that might pertain to a patient’s discomfort. In the absence of such, the psychiatrist’s ability to help the patient is limited at best. Various drugs, of course, can blunt the emotions, which may be helpful in the short term for those who are on emotional overload, so to speak, but in the end, the application of reason and the tenets of faith—summed up in what everyone used to call “character”—is still all that exists.
The term “behavioral science,” as I refer to it in these pages is Psychology with a capital P, the one that has been hijacked by a mostly leftist faction and turned into a virtual state religion. This is something based in politics, not in medicine, and it has reared its vicious head down through the years in the form of Hitler’s Third Reich and communism’s political prisons-cum-psychiatric “hospitals.” Unfortunately, the 1940s produced experiments in psychological manipulation—some of which can be classified as torture—that for half a century allowed Psychology to change the political landscape, morphing into a tool of coercion under the deceptive phrase “mental health.” This is the Psychology that has infiltrated the schools, the courts, the theological seminaries and to some extent has spread even to medicine itself.
That is why even those few educators who do specialize in an academic subject in college often wind up “facilitating” some other subject once they hit the classroom.
Facilitating and coaching: That’s what teaching is called now. This entails a whole new curricular experience: "survival and coping skills," "anger management," "conflict resolution," "self-esteem," "diversity," and more. Little in the curriculum provides insight into our cultural, constitutional or theological underpinnings. Courses like logic, philosophy, and civics, which once helped kids get a handle on modern issues, are practically gone. Nothing supports ideals like self-reliance, property rights, limited government (especially in the context of regulatory power), or religious morality in society. Physics, chemistry, calculus, and physiology are reserved for the few with very high IQ scores, kids who are then summarily skimmed off the top for what can best be described as ideological studies in political correctness, or else rounded up to "mentor" slower students.
Quite by accident I discovered the specifics of the campaign to re-orient education’s purpose. A left-wing cadre of so-called “behaviorist” educators—psychologists like the late Ralph Tyler, Richard Wolf, and Walcott Beatty—began urging their colleagues to abandon traditional concepts about right and wrong. Suddenly something called “high religiosity” was deemed a risk factor (a.k.a. marker) for mental illness. Religion itself became equated with dogmatism, inflexibility, resistance to change, paranoia, and irrationality—echoing the pronouncements of infamous atheists from the late 1800s to the early 1930s—Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Franz J. Kallman and John Dewey.
